Principal Investigator(s):
Friday, Paul C., University of North Carolina-Charlotte;
Ren, Xin, California State University-Sacramento;
Weitekamp, Elmar, University of Tubingen

Summary:

This study was designed by American criminologist Marvin
Wolfgang as a replication of his DELINQUENCY IN A BIRTH COHORT studies
conducted in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (ICPSR 7729 and ICPSR 9293).
The focus of the study is a cohort of all persons born in 1973 in the
Wuchang District of the city of Wuhan. This district was selected
because it was a populous commercial and residential area. The cohort
birth year was chosen to reflect the impact of major economic and
social changes in China. Data include interviews with all known
criminal offenders as of 1990 and with a matched comparison
sample. Additional residential, demographic, and updated criminal
history data as of 2000 were collected on all persons born in the
1973 Wuchang District cohort.

This study was designed by American criminologist Marvin
Wolfgang as a replication of his DELINQUENCY IN A BIRTH COHORT studies
conducted in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (ICPSR 7729 and ICPSR 9293).
The focus of the study is a cohort of all persons born in 1973 in the
Wuchang District of the city of Wuhan. This district was selected
because it was a populous commercial and residential area. The cohort
birth year was chosen to reflect the impact of major economic and
social changes in China. Data include interviews with all known
criminal offenders as of 1990 and with a matched comparison
sample. Additional residential, demographic, and updated criminal
history data as of 2000 were collected on all persons born in the
1973 Wuchang District cohort.

Guidelines for Applying for Restricted Data

Before you begin an application you will need the following information to complete the form

General Requirements:

appointment at research institution; appointment must be under the jurisdiction of the receiving institution

degree requirements (possibly doctorate)

Must be submitted:

project description

IRB approval

approved security plan

roster of research and IT staff who can access or view the data or computer where data are hosted.

confidentiality pledges for all people on roster

Some require:

CV's

Access to these data is restricted. Users interested in obtaining these data must complete a Restricted Data Use Agreement, specify the reasons for the request, and obtain IRB approval or notice of exemption for their research.

Any public-use data files in this collection are available for access by the general public.
Access does not require affiliation with an ICPSR member institution.

Universe:
All persons born in the Wuchang District of the city of
Wuhan, China, in 1973.

Data Type(s):
administrative records data,
survey data

Methodology

Study Purpose:
This study was designed by American criminologist
Marvin Wolfgang as a replication of his DELINQUENCY IN A BIRTH COHORT
studies conducted in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (ICPSR 7729 and ICPSR
9293). It was initially a collaboration among the Chinese Society of
Juvenile Delinquency Research (CSJDR), the International Exchange
Association of the Ministry of Education, the Public Security
Institute of the Ministry of Public Security, the Public Security
Department of Hubei Province, the Public Security Bureau of Wuhan
City, and the Sellin Center for Studies in Criminology and Criminal
Law, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. The study began in
1990 with a small amount of funding from Wolfgang, but it was not
completed at that time. After Wolfgang's death in 1998, the CSJDR
invited the principal investigators of this study to complete the data
collection and analysis of the Wuhan cohort. The goals of this project
were to locate and determine what data had been collected and what
data needed to be collected to complete the study, to gather the
necessary data to draw conclusions regarding the accuracy of the
original report of a delinquency rate of less than 2 percent, and to
analyze the entire cohort dataset. The project was considered
important since it was the first contribution from a non-western
society to the international literature on longitudinal and cohort
research.

Study Design:
The research site, the city of Wuhan, and the
birth cohort were selected by the Chinese team and Wolfgang in
1990. Wuhan is the capital city of Hubei province and one of the most
important industrial cities in central China located along the Yangtze
River and Hanjaing River. It is an urban, heavily industrial city
with three distinct districts geographically divided by the two
rivers. The cohort consists of all persons who were born in 1973 in
the Wuchang District of the city of Wuhan. Wuchang was the most
populous major commercial and residential area of Wuhan. It was an
area that seemed most likely to experience the impact of the economic
changes in China. The district was also selected as the site because
of the personal contacts of the Chinese team with the authorities,
which meant that access to all data and information was assured. The
cohort birth year is significant because it was the first year after
China's major new open policy. As such, the persons in the sample were
the first to experience the impact of major economic and social
changes. The original cohort, as defined by Wolfgang, consisted of
5,341 individuals. Part 1, the Offender and Matched Comparison Data,
consists of 81 persons from Wolfgang's original cohort who were
identified as having a criminal record, plus a matched control group
of an additional 81 people. The respondents in this dataset were
interviewed by Wolfgang. Data from the original instruments were never
computer coded or statistically analyzed independently of the Police
Statistical Bureau's summaries. Interviewers traveled in Wuhan and
seven other provinces to follow-up the original subjects during 1994
and 1995, but the data they collected were never coded and analyzed
because the team was dismissed due to lack of funding. Data collection
for this study included locating the original hand-written data and
interviews from the offender and matched comparison data collected by
Wolfgang. These surveys were translated and the data were entered into
an electronic database. The detailed information from the residential
registration cards providing data on crime and delinquency among the
original 5,341 people in the cohort were not collected in the original
study and thus no information was available on the entire cohort. The
only available data were from the original and follow-up interviews of
the 162 people in the offender and matched comparison dataset. Thus,
while the original project was defined as a cohort study, it was
merely a study of the original 81 offenders and a matched
sample. Because there were no data available to relocate the original
birth cohort identified by Wolfgang and the Chinese team, the
principal investigators for this study had to reselect the cohort from
the files using the same criteria used in the Wolfgang study (Part
2). Due to a very restricted residential registration system,
population mobility was minimal. Therefore, it is likely that a vast
majority of those identified in the second cohort selection were also
in the original Wolfgang cohort. Residential file information was
gathered for the new cohort and a criminal history check was completed
on all persons in the cohort. The criminal history check included not
only the officially registered crimes, but also a check of the local
police and community committee records of public safety violations.

Sample:
According to the most recent census at the time of the
original data collection in 1990, the Wuchang District had 722,599
individuals and 204,254 households within 12 neighborhoods. The
original sample identified 5,341 persons who were born in 1973 and
lived in the district from the age of 13 until the data collection
period in 1990. Within this group were 2,700 males and 2,641
females. Between 1991 and 1992 the 722,599 individual residential
registration files in each of the 12 neighborhood police offices were
reviewed to identify those individuals meeting the age and residency
requirements who had records of delinquent criminal behavior. Of the
5,341 born in 1973, the researchers identified 81 persons (1.5
percent) with records. Of these 81 persons, 76 were male and 5 were
female. From the 5,341 people in the cohort, a control sample of 81
persons was matched by gender, neighborhood background, parental
economic status and occupation, and neighborhood school district.
Since the administrative records data from the original cohort of
5,341 people were not retained, the principal investigators for this
study reselected the cohort from the residential files using the same
criteria that Wolfgang used in 1990. This resulted in a cohort of
5,338 people.

Data Source:

Part 1: Data were collected through interviews by
Marvin Wolfgang. Part 2: Data were obtained from residential files
and criminal history checks.

Description of Variables:
Demographic variables in Part 1 include gender,
educational background, and occupation. Other variables include
educational ambitions, time spent after school on a variety of
activities, reading interests, opinions about labor, extracurricular
activities, type of ideal job, relationships with teachers, parents'
occupations, parents' expectations of children, family discussions,
family's material well-being, relationships with friends, dating
relationships, descriptions of self, number of delinquent acts, and
reasons for delinquency. Demographic variables in Part 2 include
gender, birthdate, birthplace, religion, education level, marital
status, military status, and occupation. Other variables in this file
are dates when subjects moved into and out of the address in their
residential file, number of public safety violations, types and dates
of public safety violations, number of criminal offenses, types and
dates of criminal offenses, and penalties for criminal offenses.

Response Rates:
Not applicable.

Presence of Common Scales:
Several Likert-type scales were used in Part 1.

Extent of Processing: ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of
disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major
statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to
these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection:

Checked for undocumented or out-of-range codes.

Version(s)

Original ICPSR Release: 2004-01-07

Version History:

2006-03-30 File UG3751.ALL.PDF was removed from any previous datasets and flagged as a study-level file, so that it will accompany all downloads.

2006-03-30 File CQ3751.ALL.PDF was removed from any previous datasets and flagged as a study-level file, so that it will accompany all downloads.